Heretical Demo Patch Notes 0.2.5d

Greetings Lost Souls!

Since the main game was officially released in Early Access, we decided to do an update of the Demo as well. Here's the full list of changes for this update.

Skill Changes:

  • Elemental Overload: Damage dealt grants barrier equal to 50% of the damage dealt. This barrier slowly fades away after 3 seconds.
  • Meteor: Delay before landing reduced by 50%.
  • Ice Spears: Fixed wrongly assigned values on level 1:
    • Cooldown from 2 seconds to 4 seconds
    • Max Spears from 4 to 3
  • Swirling Carnage: Now gains benefits from Increased Missile Damage. It now shows how many stacks it has in its icon.
  • Death's Gamble: now increases attack speed and cooldown reduction when you score a critical hit for a short duration.
  • Buff Duration now reworked into Skill Duration which increases duration of skills benefiting from it.
  • All skills now have proper skill flags showing what they benefit from.

Item Changes:

  • Porcupine: Now shoots 5 spikes in front of you when blocking incoming damage.
  • New Offhand Item: Skull Fetish - increases cooldown reduction by 25% while being used.
  • Boulder Breaker: Projectile speed from the boulder doubled to make it more efficient.
  • New affix - Skill Damage - increases damage dealt by skills by %.
  • Amulets now drop more often.

Balance Changes:

  • Dexterity Bonuses:
    • Crit Chance per point of dex reduced from 0.5 to 0.25.
    • Each point of Dexterity now grants +1 Increased Decay Damage.
  • Poise: Some larger enemies, such as Inquisitors, Overseers, Longbowmen and Bosses now have stagger bar which allows you to stun them if you dish out enough attack damage in a short interval. Note that after they become stunned this way, it will take more hits to stun them again.
  • Item Movespeed: Various weapons and shields now reduce your movespeed differently based on weapon type. For example, two handed maces let you move slower than one handed swords.
  • Armor Penetration no longer allows you to reduce enemy's armor below 0.
  • Negative Elemental Resistance now increases damage taken from corresponding element (same goes for Magic and Decay resistance).
  • Darkness Mechanic rework:
    • Each time you survive the Darkness encounter, all enemies in the world become stronger.
    • Nameless Abyss no longer does constant decay damage to you while in the darkness.
    • Tentacles now have a ranged attack which sprays 4 spikes around you dealing ranged damage.
    • Range on Tentacles' melee attacks reduced.
    • Reduced attack damage of Tentacles.
    • When entering darkness, all enemies are pulled in with you, while being converted into Shades which attack you slowly and shoot a Dark Bomb at your location when killed.
    • Only equipped weapons can be cursed. Holstered items can no longer be cursed.
  • Bosses now drop several items upon defeating them.
  • Missiles shot at enemies outside of range now disappear after reaching their range limit.
  • Block Force no longer provides passive damage reduction when not attacking. Instead, you have to use a shield to benefit from it.
  • Dodge Chance capped at 60%.
  • Cooldown Reduction capped at 75%.
  • Fire damage now has 5% chance to burn enemies.
  • Frost damage now has 5% chance to chill enemies.
  • Lightning damage now has 5% chance to shock enemies, causing them to take increased damage from direct damage.
  • Magic damage now reduces Armor and Resistances of enemies for 3 seconds.

Shop Reworked:

  • New Items: You are offered 3 new items of Rare or Magic rarity, potentially a Unique if you have unique items in the pool.
  • Items Upgrades: Besides new items, you can choose to upgrade items you already have by adding one of the "Gold" stats to them. These stats include:
    • Bonus XP per kill.
    • Chance to chill enemies.
    • Chance to blind enemies.
    • Poisonous attacks.
    • Dash Cooldown reduction.
    • Increased healing when you gain a level.
    • Increased item quantity.
    • Increased item quality.
    • Increased proc chance.
    • Increased projectile damage.
  • Banish and Rerolls: gain +1 banish or reroll for your run.
  • Get a random skill: buy a random skill which can be declined if it doesn't fit your build.
  • Potion of Insight: gain +2 xp per kill for next 25 enemies.
  • Elixirs: Buy an elixir which grants you permanent stat increases per run.
  • Specific Skill: One specific skill is offered as a new skill or an upgrade for a fixed price.

Enemies:

  • Plagued Rat: HP reduced, decay resistance reduced, poison on hit reduced.

Developer comment: We felt like bosses didn't feel like the proper challenge so we wanted to increase the length of those fights.

QoL And Bugfixes:

  • Added Key rebinding in the main menu and ingame so you can remap controls as you wish.
  • Added a bunch of enemy sounds, ambiance and music cues.
  • You can now destroy various props around the map.
  • Added a lot of new VFX effects for skills and various world events.
  • Added random character option in the character selection menu when you have at least 3 characters unlocked.
  • Compendium updated.
  • Fixed many wording, UI and UX issues.
  • Added virtual keyboard to profile creation screen.
  • When gamepad is disconnected, the game goes to pause screen.
  • Added run history in the main menu which allows you to look at your previous runs.
  • Added block tutorial in the sanctuary of the forlorn.
  • When you die, a death screen shows your run stats.

As always be sure to join our Discord channel to stay up to date with our development and be able to give us feedback, suggest changes, or report issues.